Gung Hay Fat Choy (“May You Prosper”)! In San Francisco and other cities with large Asian populations, the celebration of the Chinese New Year is welcomed by hundreds of thousands of people. I’ve seen many Chinese New Year Parades downtown here and am always amazed at the colorful costumes, beautiful floats, throngs of onlookers, dancing dragons and decibel levels of the firecrackers.

This year’s Lunar New Year festivities began on January 21. The big parade in celebration of The Year of The Dog will be Saturday, February 11 at 5:30pm, starting at Second and Market Streets and continuing up Geary through Union Square, north on Powell Street for one block, down Post Street, then up Kearny Street adjacent to Chinatown, ending at Jackson Street, just a fortune cookie’s toss from North Beach.